---
title: But this happy state of things did not last long. — The Red Fairy Book · tree and pragmatics
description: But this happy state of things did not last long. Who acts: happy state. A sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Pig, with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The Red Fairy Book, The Enchanted Pig, sentence 16

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But this happy state of things did not last long.

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**Who acts:** happy state · **What happens:** not last

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This is a sentence of «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, The Enchanted Pig. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (happy state), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Checked tree.** This sentence is in the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3 (`gutenberg:pg540:1198`): parsed by Mova, then checked and patched by a teacher model under UD validation gates — Mova annot: Rust (en) → Claude Opus (medium) patches; gates UD 2.18.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = book:pg540:12:16
# text = But this happy state of things did not last long.
1	But	but	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
2	this	this	DET	DT	Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	4	det	_	_
3	happy	happy	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	state	state	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
5	of	of	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
6	things	thing	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nmod	_	_
7	did	do	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	9	aux	_	_
8	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	9	advmod	_	_
9	last	last	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
10	long	long	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	9	advmod	_	_
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **not** **last** | past · do-support | this happy state of things |  |  |  |  | long *property* | vn cost-54.2 «NP V NP.value»: agent=Theme |

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One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

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**Text:** «The Red Fairy Book» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 540 (public domain in the USA). **Tree:** the tales treebank of Mova corpus 0.3, Apache-2.0 OR MIT. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the chapter read in order.

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